Consider It Your Debt Repaid
by Stunt Muppet
Summary: You owe me life. Post-Season 2 Silent Hill-inspired AU, non-canon-compliant with Season 3. Warning for violence, gore, body horror, themes of suicide and domestic abuse. Title is from The Decemberists' "The Wanting Comes in Waves/Repaid".
1. Ram's Head, Maine

Much to his surprise, Sam Shaw picked up her phone.

"Where are you?" he asked, before she could say anything. She rolled her eyes, continuing to adjust the camera in her hands. "Nice to hear from you too. I'm just outside the psych hospital, keeping an eye on our mutual friend. Any word from Research yet?"

"Got a call two days ago. We think it might be a guidepost to where the hardware got shipped."

"So where're we headed, then?" she asked, zooming the lens in as a white van rolled out of the hospital's front gates. A quick snap caught the license plate – in case she needed it for later.

"Finch and I are headed upstate," he replied. She noticed the pointed absence of her name. "I'll need you to stay here and look out for Carter and Fusco while we're gone."

"You're heading off to track down a rogue A.I. and you want me to babysit? Fuck that."

"There are a lot of eyes on them, Shaw. I need someone watching them with their best interests at heart. Think of it as protecting assets. You've done that before, haven't you?" The street he was on offered an oblique view of the police station entrance; so far, neither Joss nor Lionel had been led out surrounded by officers, but on the other hand, he hadn't seen Joss enter or leave the whole time he'd been there.

"Yeah, it was boring then too."

"You'll be dogsitting." She only grumbled in response. "Bear misses you terribly."

"I'll bet he does," she gave in. "You know you're going to owe me a hell of a favor for this."

"I know. I'll give you the details back at the safehouse in twenty."

She shut off the camera, clicked the lens cap on. "Upstate, huh?"

"Little further than that, actually."

* * *

><p><em>One Day Prior<em>

"_I don't think the Machine sent us a number, Mr. Reese," Harold said as soon as he came in, not looking up from his computer desk. "I think it sent us a location."_

_John pulled up a chair next to the desk; trying to keep track of three people for most of the day wasn't the hardest day at work he'd ever had, but he welcomed a moment to take a load off._

_When Harold answered the ringing payphone on their return to New York, it had given him two titles - two Dewey sequences - and what he had described as a garbled, mixed audio. The two numbers had shown up in five different Social Security numbers; John had been assigned three of them, and had found nothing suggesting them as victims or perpetrators._

"_At first I thought the Machine was simply malfunctioning, but even at its most critically infected it still waited until it had a complete number to call." Harold pulled up a set of satellite photos. "So I started running through any six-number sequences I could think of - serial numbers, zip codes preceded by a zero, that sort of thing. Turns out if you enter these numbers as coordinates, it gives you four locations, depending on which side of the date lines you place them on. Middle of the Pacific Ocean, mountain in Kazakhstan, plains in Chile, and…"_

"_Ram's Head, Maine." John read off the screen. The GPS cursor blinked over a section of mostly empty forest, dotted with thin grey streets and thin grey houses. "It didn't use the code when it talked to me before. Why would it use it now if it wasn't giving us a number?"_

"_I don't know." Harold didn't look up when he replied, writing down a few numbers on a sheet of paper. "Now that neither of us has administrative access it may not consider us authorized to receive information directly. I'm afraid I'm unable to predict its behavior the way I could before the infection."_

"_The place appears to have been centered around a lumber mill, once," he continued as he wrote. "It was abandoned about twelve years ago; from what I can tell the mill shut down due to one too many accidents. Presumably there's some infrastructure left surrounding the plant that the Machine can use to supply its own power, at least enough of it to run its most basic functions."_

"_You think that's where it's moved?" he asked, watching as Harold got up from the computer chair and opened a drawer behind him. He wondered what the point was of turning the Machine loose if it was just going to call them to collect it within a day, but then, he hadn't programmed it. _

"_I think there's something there that it wants us to find, whether it's the hardware or not," he answered, pulling a road atlas out from the drawer. "Pack your bags, Mr. Reese. We're going to Maine." _

* * *

><p>They didn't speak much on the drive up, save to work out logistics - when to stop and where, when to switch drivers. Beyond that, Harold mostly looked out the window away from him, gazing out the window for eight long hours as cities gave way to cracked and rusted towns which in turn dissolved into forests.<p>

Best not to press him at a time like this. Even without the events of the past few days, Harold wasn't fond of filling silence with idle words. He'd talk to him when he needed to.

He hoped Joss had received his message. He hadn't been able to find a safe time to talk to her, and being seen with him now would put her at too great of a risk. He'd managed to corner Lionel only once, asking him to pass on his message to Joss, and for now that was all he could do. The longer they waited, the greater the chance that someone else - anyone else - could figure out where they were going.

"Maybe we shouldn't go after it," Harold said, without prompting, as John pulled the car away from a half-dead gas station in Massachusetts. "I doubt it would want to come back, now that it's free."

"Wish you'd told me that before we left," was his only reply, deliberately flat and purposefully withholding comment on the subject of the Machine. _Free _worried him. _Free_ was how Root talked.

He had a spark of a selfish thought - if they didn't pursue the Machine, if they left it alone and never heard from it again - what would he do then? He had rebuilt his whole life on the foundation of the Irrelevant list; if that went away...he disliked the idea of not having a direction.

So, he suspected, did Harold.

They stopped for the evening in a nondescript, two-floor hotel two hours from their destination; they took separate rooms on separate floors so if one was detected the other would remain hidden. But the phone line between them, as always, was on even when they had nothing to say, and John could tell from the sounds on the other end - the mumble of the television and the clicking of computer keys - that Harold did not sleep.

* * *

><p>It wasn't until they passed a vacant gas station, floodlights broken and burned-out sign corroded to nothing, that they even knew they'd reached the town. Ram's Head did not greet them, with welcome signs or passerby, and was exactly as deserted as his research had described it.<p>

"Abandoned places all over the country and it choses here. Hard to imagine why," Harold said, as they drove by one empty walkway after another. A few businesses had their lights on in their windows - the post office, a drugstore, an unlabeled building too squat and sturdy to be a house - but the rest of the scenery consisted of boarded-up windows and mouldering brick, and that was on the livelier streets. Past the two-block downtown lay weedy lots and houses given over to black mold and lichen. If anyone lived in them, they had long since given up their care.

"There's nobody here to notice it," John replied. "It's quiet, empty...seems like it'd be perfect."

"Nobody here to care for it, either. The Machine requires maintenance, power. Someone to supply it with everything it needs to stay active, whether they know what they're doing or not. In Hanford, it had an entire crew of technicians trained to operate nuclear reactors. Here…" he paused, letting another empty street pass by the window, "here it has whoever's left. Head for the power station," he continued, indicating a building outside of town on the satellite image on his phone. "If the hardware has been moved here, I'll be able to tell from the station records."

John complied, turning left at the next intersection. From the overgrown residential area another former commercial street faded in, with a shuttered shop, a row of dark townhouses, the long-spent neon of a hole-in-the-wall bar -

And a public library.

He hit the brakes, stopping the car in the middle of the road, and looked over at the square brick building again. He hadn't mistaken it - in concrete above the door was the word "Library". There were lights on behind the unbarred door, and beside it hung a still-undisturbed sign: "Free and open to the public, Monday - Saturday, 9 - 4".

His traveling companion did not seem to mind that he had stopped. Indeed, he mirrored his puzzled expression, and, giving voice to John's thoughts, asked "Why would there still be a library?"

"It even looks occupied," he added. "Seems like that'd be the first thing to go in a town like this."

"Could be why the Machine sent the coordinates to us in library code," he replied. "Maybe it meant to lead us here."

He didn't need specific instructions to pull the car over and put it in park, locking the doors as they exit - though he couldn't think what he was locking them against.

* * *

><p>The library was indeed open, and the door unlocked. A bell rang as they entered, though even it seemed dampened and tired.<p>

A librarian's desk sat directly in front of the door, next to a "Quiet Please" sign with a letter missing. Its occupant barely looked up at them. He might have been engrossed in the book in front of him, but from his expression he was merely too bored to care.

The card at the front of the desk read "Ernest Thornhill".

He even looked like the composite that the Machine had created - squared-off face, brown hair, slightly upturned nose. Noticing their stares, he looked up from his reading, met their gazes one by one with an unimpressed expression. "Something I can help you with?"

Harold was the first to shake his head. "No, no. We'll just be a moment." Nodding back at John, he headed back towards the Spanish-language section, where the first code the Machine gave him came from.

"Think it's a coincidence?" John asked quietly, as they walked past the shelves.

"The librarian, you mean?" he answered, running his index and middle fingers along the spines of the books as he searched the shelf. "Possibly. I assumed the Machine had simply fabricated a name, one that didn't already exist, but it's not hard to believe that Mr. Thornhill was another sign for us." He glanced backwards, checking to see if the subject of their conversation was listening in.

"When the Machine pulled his number, Shaw and I couldn't find any records. No birth certificate, no driver's license." John eventually found the coded book and reached over Harold's head for it, pulling it from the shelf. "If the Machine was using his identity, why weren't there any signs he really existed?"

The book naturally fell to a middle page as he opened it, as though it had been left open to that page for days on end. But the page that greeted him was blank.

Frowning, he showed the page to Harold, who took it from his hands. "Is it misprinted?" he asked, fanning through the remaining pages.

"Not sure," he replied. "I'll find the second book." The next number was a few shelves down, and he stepped past Harold as he continued to inspect the empty volume.

Harold checked the cover again; so far as he could tell it was the correct book, the only one that matched the code, not one in a series or any such thing. No errors on the jacket to indicate a misprint, either.

Maybe this book was intentionally blank. The contents of Number books had no bearing on their purpose. He was unused to checking them save for his own pleasure, and wasn't in the habit of perusing Spanish-language dictionaries. He opened it up again, leafed through the first few empty pages, and stopped.

On the third page was a title, accompanied by an edition number, a publisher, a year of release. But all of them were clumsily handwritten. Instead of printed lines the publication information wandered downwards, outwards; it was peppered with misspellings and cross-outs, as if the writer had only heard the language, but never seen it written.

He turned the page; the next one was handwritten, too, some sort of introduction in black ballpoint pen, written quickly, like notes, rather than a handmade manuscript. The handwriting - always print - tidied as the book went on, settling into rows as the text moved from introductions to definitions.

He reshelved the book, picked up the one next to it. "Mr. Reese?" he said into the earpiece. "Come and look at this." The second book opened to another handwritten page, this one neater, more uniform. He pulled out the next book; this one, too, contained row after row of neat but unmistakably human handwriting.

He walked further down the row of bookshelves, stopped at the next section, and pulled out the first book he saw; more handwriting greeted him, this time in precisely-accented French. "Mr. Reese?" he repeated, realizing he'd heard no reply. The other end of the line remained silent.

He stepped out from the bookshelves and checked the hallway; no sign of John. Maybe the cell signal in the building was weak, and he hadn't heard him. "Mr. Reese?" he called out down the hallway. There was no one else in the building to hear him save for the librarian.

No answer. Had he left? Perhaps they'd been found or followed, and something had happened to him - but he'd have heard the struggle, if it had. Wasn't like him to go quietly. Had he been so distracted by the handwritten book that he'd neglected to listen?

If something had happened to him, he thought grimly, then whoever had done it now knew where he was as well - if they didn't before. He stepped back behind the bookshelf, checking behind him.

Maybe John had just left, or received a call from Shaw or Carter or Fusco. Though John had said nothing about it Harold knew he'd been concerned about them; if they called, he'd have answered. And even they'd been followed, then his first step should still be to get back to the car. Better separated than stranded.

He doubled back first, towards the 690s where the other book was. No disturbance, no scattered books or overturned trolleys, nothing to indicate a struggle. And yet there was no sign of John.

Out of curiosity he picked up the second coded book, the one John had gone to fetch. It was undisturbed from the shelf, with more handwriting - this one disordered and messy - inside.

He peeked out into the hallway before heading towards the front door, glancing into the shelves as he passed them in case anyone was waiting for him. But every row was empty. The place was a tomb.

When he made his way back to the librarian's desk - where he was certain the front door had been - he found nothing in front of him but a blank wall. Behind him the flesh-and-blood Thornhill read quietly, unconcerned or uninterested in his guests.

Perhaps he'd gotten turned around, he thought, even though he was certain the librarian's desk was the first thing he'd seen when he'd gone in. The opposite end of the building held another blank wall, paint peeling from the damp - as did the west end, and the east end, save for a wooden door leading to a decrepit bathroom.

And the entire time, the phone line was silent.

"Sir? Sir? I'm closing up for lunch." The voice, he found when he started and turned around in surprise, belonged to Thornhill, who was still holding his book. "You got everything you need?"

"Ah - yes, yes I do. I'll just…" How had he not heard the other man approaching, either? Letting someone surprise him, losing the only door - his head just wouldn't clear today.

But the librarian did not seem to care about his hesitance, taking a set of keys out of his pocket as he walked away.

Waiting for him to gain a few paces on him, Harold followed. This Thornhill was the first human being either of them had seen since they left the hotel that morning; there hadn't even been a car on the road for the last thirty miles. If they'd been detected, Thornhill was likely involved. Besides, he knew which way the exit was, silly as Harold felt needing to follow someone to get out of a single-story brick building.

Thornhill strode towards the back of the library, on the opposite side of the building from his desk, leaving his book on an empty trolley as he passed it and never looking behind him. Harold was sure he'd already looked back here. And he hadn't noticed before, but this place was deceptively large for a library, especially for a town so small. He seemed to have been walking for quite some time.

(He lifted the cover of the librarian's book as he passed the trolley; it too was full of handwriting. How were there so many of them?)

After rounding one final bookshelf, full of magazines and newspapers (even the pictures looked drawn by hand), Thornhill at last came to the door. Only this must not have been the door that Harold entered through, because that door wasn't boarded up and barred. He distinctly remembered that; that was why they'd stopped.

What's more, for someone so concerned about closing, Thornhill didn't even check to see if Harold was leaving. He just walked out the door and shut it behind him; as soon as he left there was a click of a latch.

Harold quickened his pace, cleared the space to the door. Could be that this Thornhill hadn't forgotten - could be that he'd locked him in. He pulled experimentally on the handle; the lock held firm on the inside. A glance at the door's edge revealed no deadbolts or chains; perhaps he could force it.

The lock yielded easily enough, with minimal coaxing. He edged the door open and looked through the crack in the door, expecting any number of things - police, armed civilians, possibly even the wreck of their car.

What he didn't expect was a hallway.

He opened the door an inch or two wider, and finding no one outside, stepped through, holding it open. It couldn't be part of the same building as the library; for one thing it was barely lit, and mostly concrete rather than brick and plaster. A set of steel stairs like a fire escape descended downwards. He couldn't see where they went.

"You were looking for your friend, right?" Thornhill reappeared from the bottom of the stairs, as though he'd been waiting. Harold tensed, unsure of what was coming. "He should be back here. This goes back out to the road at the end."

So far as he could tell Thornhill was unarmed, with no means of reaching Harold before he shut the door and went back to the library. He'd find the regular exit. It had to be somewhere - he had just missed it somehow, he had to have.

"The other door's gone by now," the other man answered his thought; the steel beneath his feet clattered as he climbed the last stair. Even though Harold was still standing in the doorway he felt suddenly cornered. "Besides, it's not safe out there. You ought to know that, Harold."

Behind him, the lights of the library suddenly went dark - pitch dark, like a black bag had dropped over his head. He snapped the door shut, stumbling back into the library until he backed into a bookshelf. The shelves held nothing but dust, devoid of the books he knew had been there.

He scanned the darkness - how could it be so dark in here when it was only noon outside? - and searched. For a way out, for another person, for something. But all that followed was the librarian, dimly backlit, holding the door open for him.

"Do you want to get out or not?" he asked, plain as if he was asking the time of day.

He stepped away from the bookshelf slowly, leaving one hand on the empty shelf to anchor him - who knew what else might change behind his back if he didn't. "How do you know my name?"

He couldn't see the other man's expression, but his voice betrayed nothing. "Why wouldn't I? Look, if you're going, then go. I don't want to be here all day."

Through it all, through his earpiece, there hadn't been a word.

Each step he took towards the door felt like a mistake, a blunder into an open pit. But what would happen if he stayed here, in the huge dark library, locked in and waiting to be found?

He'd find another way out. He'd escape. If Thornhill was his captor, he had to be leading him somewhere - somewhere he'd be able to get free. He stepped over the threshold, and the door shut behind him with a snap.

* * *

><p>The phone on the hospital wall had rung again, two days after the first time. Root didn't answer it. She didn't have to.<p>

She'd spent the past two days watching, learning the orderlies' schedules, overhearing from their snatches of conversation which ones were on call to assist the people they referred to as "the real crazies" - the violent, the unpredictable. The ones who were charged with the care of heavy sedatives and chemical restraints, in case their patients acted up.

It was easy to stay off that list herself. After all, no one here knew she'd really done. And She had told her to wait, so wait she would, even if it took the signal months to come. She had to be ready.

As much as it thrilled her to be called to action she would have almost preferred a longer wait. She hadn't had time to let them grow truly complacent around her, to learn their secrets, their evacuation plans. But they still found her cooperative enough to require only a single escort.

An escort who, when surprised by a twisted bedsheet around his throat, was quickly quieted.

He passed out too quickly to get to his radio, but she could tell from the noise outside her cell that someone had heard them, Didn't matter. The nurse with the restraining drugs was just about to pass her room.

Root didn't bother to subdue her - it'd take too long. It was seconds' work to pull the tray from her hands, to snatch up the vial of valium and shut the door behind her, leaving the staff to look for her room key.

It wouldn't have worked as an escape plan. But escape wasn't what She wanted.

She wondered, as she emptied the syringe into her veins, if it would hurt.


	2. Comminua

The second book was ordinary.

John thumbed through the pages, looking for anything missing or highlighted. After the blank dictionary he'd expected this book to follow suit, or be altered in some other way. In lieu of the Social Security number there'd be some key or detail that would lead to their destination. But this volume lacked even a scribble in the margins.

"Just an ordinary book," he said into the open phone line. He checked the bookshelf behind it, just to make sure. Nothing there either.

Harold didn't answer. Something had distracted him, probably. "You find anything, Finch?" he continued, quickly checking the book next to the one the Machine had picked out. Still ordinary. "Finch?"

He rounded the shelf back to the first book. No Finch. No Finch the next row over either, or in the main hallway. The phone remained silent. Unless Finch was purposefully keeping quiet, he should have at least responded by now. And where was the librarian? There was a bell on the door, old though it was; if they'd left, he would have heard them.

A quick browse through the rest of the library turned up no clues to Harold's silence. The building, as far as he could tell, was simply vacant.

The front door was still unlocked, their car still untouched in the parking lot. He checked underneath the car; no blown tires, no incendiaries. Nothing appeared to have happened at all.

His hand strayed to his firearm, and he drew and checked the magazine on autopilot. They'd been followed - or trapped. Harold wouldn't cut communications unless he had to; he must have been taken somewhere else.

Too much noise if he took the car. He had to surprise whoever had followed them while he still had the chance to. In the time since he'd last heard from Harold they couldn't have gone far.

* * *

><p>The streets at the edge of town, where they'd come in, were in disrepair but mostly intact, as if the inhabitants had walked away in the middle of a task. Further away from the library's, someone had helped along the process of decay. Streetlights had been felled, furniture smashed or stolen through shattered windows; glass fragments lay sprayed across the asphalt, amplifying his footsteps and potentially those of anyone following him<p>

There was even a crashed car on the end of the street. Badly crashed too, wrapped halfway around a telephone pole, its chassis melted and scorched.

He approached, steadying his grip on the gun. There was no rust on the body, nor any peeled paint, or waterlogging from being left out in the rain. The wreck was too recent for this town.

A closer look inside confirmed his suspicions. The blackened body in the driver's seat should have been a skeleton by now.

The driver was far too burnt to pick out any features; even the sex and age were indeterminate. Hitting a telephone pole wouldn't start a fire that severe, not in this type of car and not at any speed you could get up to on streets like this. Not unless someone set it. Someone didn't want anyone to know who this body belonged to, and yet the plates were still on the car, with no effort made to disguise any identifying information.

Was this what they were meant to find? he thought, as he looked through the rest of the car. A kitchen knife stuck out of the passenger's seat, too clean to have been used on the body. Had all this been a roundabout way of sending them another Number? Couldn't be. This person had been dead for a while, and why wouldn't it send them a complete Social like it always did? And even if the body wasn't old enough to be among the town's inhabitants, who would leave it here for so long? Why wouldn't they bury it, or dump it in the nearby lake?

The glass in the street popped like a short circuit.

He turned, pointing his gun in the direction of the noise. Someone - he couldn't see who - disappeared around a corner before he could steady his aim. He held his stance, waiting, still and quiet to see if his pursuer would try again. But whoever it was did not return.

Checking the streets and alleys as he passed them, he headed back up the road, towards the library. He'd been put here too long already, especially now that he knew someone was following them. If something had happened to Harold while he was aimlessly wandering the streets…

He knew he should have replaced the tracker on Harold's glasses the second they got back to New York. He hadn't had much time to do so between the three potential Numbers he'd been following, but that wasn't an excuse. He shouldn't have let Harold out of his sight until it was done.

_Pop_.

He stopped, and backed against the nearest brick wall. Still nothing there, nor on the rooftops or the windows as far as he could see. He slowed his pace as he resumed. If whoever was following him was smart enough to stay out of sight, then they'd be smart enough not to keep -

_Pop_.

Still-hot reflexes aimed the gun a third time; again, there was nothing at the end of its sights.

Must be deliberate, those noises. Meant to let him know that he was being pursued, or put him on edge. Could he be leading whoever it was back to the library, possibly to Finch if he was wrong about where he'd gone?

Best plan would still be to continue in that direction. There'd be detours or side streets that he could use to draw out whoever was following him - like the gutted alleyway to his right, between two row houses, which he quickly ducked inside. Even someone on the rooftops would eventually betray his position to take a shot, and the buildings weren't tight enough for someone to travel far along them.

But how long would that take, and how long would he be leaving Finch alone?

The alley rejoined the road amidst a pile of bricks and ruptured cement; he chose his steps carefully to keep his own position masked. He was used to picking out sound from the din of traffic and conversation; among the dust and rubble there weren't even any insects to interrupt the quiet. If he were very close he might even be able to hear a gun load and click, should his pursuers have one.

_Pop_.

The sound came from down the road, to his left, and before he returned to cover he caught sight of its source.

They limped, aimlessly, across the road from him, too slowly to be a pursuer. Their gait was halting and pained, every step snapping against the timework pavement. He could see from here the bloody footprints trailing behind them.

He began to lower his weapon, to approach the wounded figure, but before he did it staggered just a few steps towards him, and the cloud-covered sun flashed in points across their skin.

The figure's hobbled feet, and every inch of its body, were stabbed full of broken glass.

The longer he stared at the figure the less human it looked, clawing uselessly at its shattered flesh with arms that ended in glass-lanced stumps. Each movement reopened its wounds, drawing sobs from somewhere inside its caved-in body. Not from its mouth - there wasn't one - what was left of its head sunk into its chest like candle wax.

He blinked hard, looked again - and it had wandered even closer and he could see the infection gathering where glass met skin. It couldn't be real. Nothing could look like this, nothing that was still moving. He was making a mistake. Seeing things. Had to be.

As it took another painful step the body turned side to side, casting about with the sightless remains of its head. The snaps and cracks turned to shuffles and scratches. It turned without direction until it faced the alley where he'd hidden, and then - then it stopped, quieting its crying. And watched.

Something stung at his palms like a needlestick, sharp and hot enough to break his aim. He steadied his hands but the pain deepened in answer. The body still wavered, stumbling in place, staring his way.

He stepped back into the alleyway, out of the body's sight, but the gun in his grip still felt like a fistfull of barbed wire. As he holstered the weapon a blood drop fell from its handle, and there were cuts, lacy-thin, crisscrossing his hands and they had not been there before -

Outside of the alley he could hear the body staggering away, as the stinging began to subside. But it wasn't the only sound anymore.

_Pop, pop, pop_.

There were more. The noises came from the other end of the alleyway, and the opposite end of the street, and they echoed and multiplied and blurred together as they drew closer. Between them there was another set of footsteps, faster, quieter, without the scraping accompaniment.

They were coming up the alleyway now, cutting off his way out. He'd have to take his chances out in the main roads. At least there there'd be room to outrun them. He re-drew the firearm; though the sharp pain had stopped the metal was still too hot on his broken skin.

He rounded the corner, readied the gun -

- and found himself aiming it at a very much human woman, who leaped back with a yelp. She'd had a knife in her hand when she found him; in her surprise it clattered to the pavement.

He barely heard it. He barely heard anything, not even the sounds from the bodies. His grip on his firearm weakened; it seemed suddenly, impossibly heavy. He was dreaming. He was certain of that now.

Oh my god - " she stammered, scrambling for the knife and looking around her for their pursuers. "I thought - I'm sorry, I thought you were one of them, I didn't know there was anyone else - "

"Jess?"

Jessica Arndt looked back at him and froze, rooted to the spot even as the noises closed in. "John?"

* * *

><p>Sam was going to watch the cops. She really was. Later.<p>

She'd already tailed them both this morning and it was exactly as dull as she knew it would be. No threats, no danger, no suspicious activity. So she'd left. She wasn't far away if something did happen, and besides when you skulked around a police station all day people started to ask you questions.

Plus, technically speaking she was on her lunch break. Until she finished her sandwich her time was her own, and if she chose to spend it trying to figure out how to get into Root's cell undetected, that was nobody's business but hers.

To the boss' credit he'd picked out a good hospital. It was tightly secured with an eye to keeping the patients, mostly criminals from what she understood, contained. Unfortunately that made for poor prospects of getting in.

A cover ID was probably her best bet; a forcible break-in wouldn't get far. Trouble was her only real source for a solid cover ID now was Finch, and he'd ask questions if she made a request like that.

An ambulance siren blared somewhere up the road. Nothing unusual, but she'd been hearing it for quite some time, and it seemed to be getting closer. The source of the siren rounded the corner and pulled up to the hospital doors; Shaw pointed the camera at the parked vehicle, and waited.

Two EMTs emerged from the back of the ambulance, pushing a gurney between them; a man in doctor's whites, probably staff, ushered them in. If he could do that, this must have been a genuine medical emergency, and not a patient flipping out with a taser. Might have nothing to do with Root at all.

Two more, and a second padded sled; that was a little more suspicious. Two patients meant a fight.

The first patient burst through the doors a few minutes later. Through her camera lens she could see scrubs, and an oxygen mask; then, as they loaded up the first, the second gurney came through the door.

It was her.

Sam couldn't get a clear look at her, but she saw what she needed - small frame, curly hair, restraints tethering her to the gurney. An EMT carried an IV bag alongside her.

Couldn't be chance. No one in the hospital knew her to target her like this. And so soon after she'd been admitted? She wanted out, and the ambulance was her ticket.

Least that solved the problem of how Sam was going to get in.

She let the camera fall slack on its strap as she headed back to her car, listening for the direction of the siren as the ambulance began to pull away.

* * *

><p>At least he wouldn't have any trouble finding his way back, Harold thought; the hallway was a single, nearly straight path, and Thornhill passed the occasional heavy steel door but never opened them.<p>

Thus far the librarian hadn't behaved much like a captor. He hadn't secured him at all, or issued any threats, and he didn't notice Harold's furtive tugs at the doors as they passed. Not that there was much to notice; all were locked. A few gave inches but remained stuck shut.

One door creaked like an opening casket when he pulled at it, and this, unfortunately, Thornhill did not ignore.

But he showed no anger, issued no punishment for his attempt to stray from the path. He only asked "Where are you going?".

Harold had no excuse he could give so he turned his question back on Thornhill. "Where do these doors go?"

The librarian shrugged. "Who knows at this point. Used to be storage. Some of 'em go down to the water now. Not a good place to be."

Harold looked down; he'd noticed the walkway up ahead but had been too focused on the doors to see what was beneath it. The stagnant water beneath them as they crossed must have leaked from the nearby lake, and yet...he couldn't tell how deep it was from here, but it seemed more of a pond in its own right than a puddle. Debris, most of it metal, floated motionless below them, the dim light glistening off years of accumulated slime. Rust and mold had bred along the walkway grates, a dismal graveyard amid the decrepit but inorganic basement.

The only motion came from a white shape, a sail or a bedsheet that drifted across the surface like a ghost. It had snagged on something, small and strangely shaped among the hunks of concrete and steel. While they were still, the shape beneath the sheet bobbed, and waved thin protrusions like it was carried by a tide.

He continued to test the doors as they passed them, but he realized now that he wouldn't even know where to go if he did happen to find one that worked. They had to be quite some distance from the library by now, far from anything he'd recognize if he did manage to get back aboveground. And by now he was starting to tire from the walking, and from the stuffy heat of the corridor, and from the disorder of his changing surroundings. Even if he could break away he wouldn't be able to outrun Thornhill to the exit.

Past the catwalk over the water the hallway abruptly ended at another door. Though it looked as solid and heavy as the others, Thornhill only had to undo a small latch at the top.

Thornhill waited for Harold to follow him into the room, a plain grey cube with walls of brushed aluminum, but didn't wait for Harold to follow him out. As the first door shut behind him, the identical door across the room shut behind the librarian.

No trap sprung as the two doors shut. No bullet or bomb was waiting for him, which was where his mind had gone after Thornhill had left him. Instead, there seemed to be nothing in the room at all, just flat walls and flat floor and a fan in the ceiling, churning uselessly at stagnant air.

The back door even opened when he pulled it, unlocked. Cool rushed in from the hallway, far more inviting than the parched heat of the aluminum room. Thornhill had still not returned.

Beyond the opposite door, a pay phone rang harsh and clear.

He dropped the door shut instantly, the chime dispelling his nerves. This was what he was expecting, when he'd headed to this strange town. This belonged here.

The pay phone booth was the only feature of the dead-end hall that housed it. Dust clustered at its base, leaking from the metal gratings that passed for walls. No sign of Thornhill, and nowhere for him to have gone - but it didn't matter. There'd be answers, now. Or at least there'd be something.

Just as he suspected, so soon as he lifted the receiver the recorded snippets from its speaker greeted him like an old friend.

But the automated clips gave way to a voice - to _her_ voice, the one that had stayed silent as he'd driven her to the hospital and hadn't uttered a word through her check-in.

"I'm so glad you could come, Harold."


End file.
